Starting a Garden from Scratch

This year, like last year, we started a new garden where there had previously been grass. We have therefore had opportunities to try out various strategies. Here’s the outcome of these experiments.

Garden bed preparation

Last year, we tried turning over the sod so that the grass would die and the roots would be exposed and dry up. This doesn’t work: grass is feisty, and just grows up around the edges of the sod, even if the part beneath dies. The implications for fertility and soil life also seem mediocre with this process.

Both times, we tried removing the grass and shaking the earth off the roots. This also leaves a lot of roots and also weed seeds which have been lying dormant, and therefore it takes no time at all for a little jungle to spring up from the earth.

We tried sheet mulching, and this is probably the most successful method. The trouble is it takes a lot of compost and mulch to cover a large area, so this year we: a) removed the grass and superficial topsoil and composted it, b) removed the rest of the topsoil, c) loosened the subsoil, d) laid down the cardboard and replaced the topsoil on top of it, followed by dry mulch (bracken or hemp). This was a long and difficult process which we could have avoided if we had had masses of compost and just done the sheet mulching straight on top of the grass. The ground was very compacted (it had been a horse pasture), which was another reason we wanted to loosen the soil before sheet mulching.

The results were very good; we found that the soil stayed moist for a long time under the cardboard, and we had little trouble with weeds. I think the cardboard took care of any remaining grass roots, while the mulch on top took care of the seeds left in the soil. Sheet mulching was perfect for the nightshades and perennial cabbages. In the future, I think we'll try making it thicker, with more carbon mulch, mixed if necessary with blood meal or some other high nitrogen material, for additional on-site compost production and increased benefits from the sheet-mulching.

For beds in which we wanted to plant seeds (greens, beets, carrots, flowers), we decided not to sheet mulch as this didn’t seem compatible with starting seeds. The greens we planted early did alright because they grew fast and out-competed weeds anyway. Our kale and beet patch was very weedy, though the weeds were mostly very small. Presumably over the years there will be less weeds as the seeds that were present in the ground run out.

Start Small

We didn’t! We really wanted a big garden, something that would be challenging and full of food and lessons. The thing is, the bigger it is, the more dispersed your energy gets and the less effort you can spend on it per surface area. Therefore a larger garden will be less productive per unit of surface area. We definitely observed this as there were always, at any given time, parts that weren’t producing. This is the basic principle of square foot gardening. While in Montreal, I saw square foot gardening as a sort of punishment or affliction that city dwellers have to put up with due to space restrictions. Now I appreciate the underlying tenets: the smaller the garden, the easier it will be to take care of it, and the more productive it will be per unit of area.

The other thing is that we burned out a little after the mad rush to plant of the spring, and pulled back after that from the garden. I think that if we had started fewer plants of fewer varieties, we would have been less overwhelmed and more contented with our garden during the summer. We felt the pressure also to plant any successful seedlings as it was very hard to discard any, but in the end our garden was a bit too dense and unwieldy. So, when starting our own seedlings, we need to remember that some of them will need to be sacrificed for the others to grow optimally.

Also, a new garden usually takes a lot of raw materials: compost, mulch, sticks for trellises, maybe some garden furniture, stones or other landscaping stuff. Therefore starting small and really enhancing the fertility and beauty of the garden seems like a better course of action than spreading mulch too thin to be effective or running out of compost/manure half way through. After the first year, hopefully mulch plants will kick into action and the compost pile will be yielding, which will provide the resources for a successful expansion.

Plant Selection

I think that starting with lots of perennials and a few annuals would be a good balance. Perennials need time to get established, so I’d recommend putting them in first, so that in the second year there will already be a bunch of stuff growing and you can concentrate your energy on expanding on that. If you plant just annuals the first year, you will have to start all over again the next time. Annuals are not the best use of energy (or money), in the longer run.

On the other hand, it's good to make sure that some really reliable producers are included: I'm thinking about chard, beats, kale, herbs. Stuff that most likely you'll get more of than you want, unless you try very hard to mess things up. And also, I wish we'd used more earlier producers. We had very little before mid-July and the first tomatoes. Early producers like turnips, beats, greens, spinach, kohlrabi, while not the most exciting to eat (I think), are really nice to have around for their fast growth. They really help to extend the season both ways.

Planting patterns

We were a bit obsessed with companion planting this year. It must be said that in winter, when the garden is just a dream and we long to be outside with the sun warming our bones, thinking about plant combinations is like fantasizing! In the end though, companion planting is a nebulous pseudoscience which should be taken with a pinch of salt. It’s very hard to know what combinations are going to work (marginally) better than others, which you learn by observation rather than book/internet research anyway. So, no point sweating over that too much!

Rows

We’ve been resisting planting in rows, which we saw as an unnatural imposition of puritanical will upon the naturally flowing patterns of the plant world. The fact is, I think that some things benefit from being planted in rows, especially root vegetables (our broadcasted carrot seeds didn't come to any good, and we were mostly powerless to effectively care for them, spread all over the place as they were) and some alliums that need to be fairly weed free and thinned correctly. It’s virtually impossible to effectively weed young plants that aren’t in rows! Rows make is easier to identify young seedlings, and to thin them when the time comes, and then also to harvest them. Ease of harvesting was something we totally didn’t consider at the end of a rugged winter, when it was unimaginable that harvesting, that holy sacred grail, could ever be anything but pure bliss! It's really something that needs to be planned for in order to make the best use of the garden's gifts!

On the other hand, bigger plants that grow for the whole season, like tomatoes or peppers, don’t seem to need to be planted in lines as much (except maybe for ease of trellising, and, again, harvesting). Plant guilds, which are something we are just beginning to explore, also brings an end to the need for rows, but this is sort of beyond the scope of a veggie garden.

Conclusion

My biggest take home messages from this year are: we must make sure to manage our energy for our own pleasure and for the benefit of the garden (start small, don't waste energy on marginally beneficial plants, use perennials rather than annuals when possible), and relax about the theory: stuff like companion planting, soil fertility, etc., which you learn as you go along anyway, rather than sweating over volumes of gardening books that usually don't agree anyway. A creative balance of experimentation and sure shots will ensure learning and satisfaction will both flow from the garden.